IMPORTANT: If you came here because I emailed you about this meme, you should know that I’ve modified it. I was pretty psyched about the idea, but a friend of mine convinced me that it could backfire in its original form. Specifically:
"Originally, I was going to do the IPIP-NEO/Political Compass Meme. Ales Rarus passed it along as a fun idea. I think the originator of the meme was well-intentioned. But as I typed in my IPIP-NEO results, I became concerned. The IPIP-NEO is a psychological inventory test. I don’t know it’s validity. I’m not going to bother to look up it’s validity because whether it’s valid or not, I don’t want someone having access to ‘my’ results."
"Do I want a prospective employer Googling those results? If they’re not accurate, they could cost me a job. If they are accurate, I want that prospective employer to justify his need for them and then leave the decision to me. Putting them on the net is a bad idea, at least for me. I suspect it’s a universally bad idea."
I’m indebted to my friend for pointing this out. Rather than bag the whole thing, however, I’ve deleted my sub-section scores and only left the main section scores (I’ve left the political coordinates, though.). Perhaps the research possiblities for the meme are reduced that way, but people, including me, ought to feel safer. Without further ado, here’s the slightly modified IPIP-NEO/Political Compass Meme.
This is a cool meme that I think is worth passing on.
"The idea of a Go-meme (which I owe to Nova Spivack) is that it involves a ‘track list’ at the end of the post, rather like an extended hat-tip, with links to those who passed on the meme ‘upstream’ of you. This allows us to track the meme’s propagation through blog-space: just search google for your GUID (global unique identifier – it should be a short string that currently yields no results in a google search) to find all those who subsequently picked up the meme ‘downstream’ from you. It also provides an incentive to join the meme, so as to receive all those bonus links."
"To enhance the information value of the [IPIP-NEO personality test] data that this meme produces, I’ve added a few demographic questions, plus the two dimensions assessed by the Political Compass quiz. I think it would be especially interesting to learn if there are any correlations between particular personality traits and political or religious positions." [emphasis mine]
On a side note, If you decide to take the Political Compass quiz, please leave a comment with your score. I’d like graph the political leanings of my readers. If that turns out as well as I hope, I’ll post the results and hopefully other bloggers will inspired to do likewise. You also might wish to submit your coordinates to the Blogosphere Political Compass Project.
The Blogosphere Political Compass Project is graphing the approximate political affiliation of bloggers from all corners of the Internet. The chart below shows the relative positions of the bloggers who have responded thus far; graphing is done two-dimensionally in order to show both economic (liberal vs. conservative) and social (authoritarian vs. libertarian) leanings.
I’ve added Chris Lightfoot’s improvement upon the Political Compass quiz (on which I scored left/right: -2.568 and pragmatism/idealism: -5.2243) to the meme. If you give me a score for that test, I’ll map it as well.
OK. Enough hype.
Words cannot adequately express how absolutely flabbergasted by this I am. That's never stopped me from trying, though, so here goes.
“Back in the day, when my wardrobe consisted almost exclusively of tie-dye and I had my hair long and walked around with a peace symbol necklace around my neck (this was, oddly enough, not more than a decade or so ago), I was friends with a kid named Eric Williams. Eric was a year older than me, was a classic rock fan like me, and he was so pale that when he stood in the sunlight, you got kind of sonogram picture of his heart beating through his chest. Seriously. I think we met in gym class during that first week of school when the gym teachers sat everyone down on the bleachers and paced back and forth, sizing up who was going to be a good gym student, who would be kind of a whiny weakling, and who would just generally not buy into the fact that gym was an integral part of their academic studies. Eric and me…we were in that last group. Or so I remember.”
“Anyway, years passed and as happens, I lost touch with Eric. I dated his sister Katie for a good chunk of my senior year of high school, became friends with her, then became sort of not friends with her, then became really good friends with her, and now have the honor of calling her daughter my niece. It’s been kind of a saga is what I’m getting at, here. The last time I saw Eric was at Katie’s wedding, and he had grown considerably from this skinny little pale kid into a not so terribly skinny or pale adult (Katie did this, too…round about her twenties she gained the ability to tan…I think the melatonin gene must just be a late bloomer in this family) who can dance like…well, like I will never be able to dance in my life. Anyway, he and I didn’t get to chat much, but I was impressed with him nonetheless.”